YORUBA’S DON’T DO GENDER”: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF OYERONKE OYEWUMI’s The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses PDF

Preview

Summary

Despite this, there has been very little interrogation of
the concept in terms of its relevance and applicability to the African situation. Instead, gender functions as a given:
it is taken to be a cross-cultural organising principle. Recently, some African scholars have begun to questio...

Description

“YORUBA’ S DON’ T DO GENDER”: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF OYERONKE OYEWUMI’ s The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses By Bibi Bakare-Yusuf Discourses on Africa, especially those refracted through the prism of developmentalism, promote gender analysis as indispensable to the economic and political development of the African future. Conferences, books, policies, capital, energy and careers have been made in its name. Despite this, . Instead, gender functions as a given: it is taken to be a cross-cultural organising principle. Recently, some African scholars have begun to question the explanatory power of gender in African societies.1 This challenge came out of the desire to produce concepts grounded in African thought and everyday lived realities. These scholars hope that by focusing on an African episteme they will avoid any dependency on and therefore eschew what Babalola Olabiyi Yai (1999) has called . Some of the key questions that have been raised include: Can we assume that social relations in all societies are organised around biological sex difference? Is the male body in African societies seen as normative and therefore a conduit for the exercise of power? Is the female body inherently subordinate to the male body? What are the implications of introducing a gendered perspective as a starting point for the construction of knowledge about African societies?2 What are the advantages and disadvantages of using explanatory categories developed within the North to understanding different African realities? Most of these questions have been raised in a number of articles, but it is in the book The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of western Gender Discourses (1997) by the US-based Nigerian theorist Oyeronke Oyewumi that Constructing a Yoruba World-Sense The central thesis of Oyewumi’ s provocative book The Invention of Women¸ is to deny that gender is a fundamental social category in all cultures. Drawing her examples from the Oyo-Yoruba in western Nigeria, Oyewumi argues that gender has not historically been an important organising principle or a first order issue. Contra European discourse, amongst She suggests that in European culture and intellectual history, participation in the polis and cultural significance is determined by the meaning ascribed to the body. Here, her argument resonates with other critiques of the European schism between ’ . The body is regarded as the site of irrationality, passion and moral corruption. The mind, in contrast, functions as the seat of reason and restraint. This dualism enabled the association of certain groups with the body and bodily functions, and others with reason and spirit. Those conceived as irrefutably embodied were visibly marked out for enslavement, oppression and cultural manipulation. For Elizabeth Spelman, the oppression of women is located in ‘ the meanings assigned to having a woman’ s body by male oppressors’ and the oppression of black people has ‘ been linked to the meanings assigned to having a black body by white oppressors’ (1989: 129). In a similar vein, Oyewumi attributes the biologizing of difference to the primacy of vision in European intellectual history. Privileging the visual facilitates an emphasis on appearance and visible markers of difference. Oyewumi concludes that etc. The

(Oyewumi

1997:xii). Oyewumi rejects a similarly visualist mechanism at work in African societies. Her key claim is that unlike Europe, African cultures are not and have not historically been ordered according to a logic of vision, but rather through other senses. In this way, she suggests that the notion of a ” is only appropriate to the context. She proposes that better matches the way of knowing. At base, Oyewumi contests the idea that a western categorical schema for understanding society and social dynamics can simply be exported elsewhere. For Oyewumi, students of Africa must recognise that a greater degree of conceptual sensitivity is 1

See Ife Amadiume Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion, Culture (1997); the following articles in Jenda: A Journal of Culture and African Women’s Studies (2001) edited by Nkiru Nzegwu & Oyeronke Oyewummi: Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome ‘African Women and Power: Reflections on the Perils of Unwarranted Cosmopolitanism’; Nkiru Nzegwu ‘Gender Equality in a Dual-Sex System: The Case of Onitsha’ 2 Of course these questions are not new, feminists anthropologist such as Heneritta Moore have posed similar questions along side post-structuralist feminists with their theories of gendered identity that moves beyond the sacrificial logic set-up in second-wave feminist accounts of sexual difference.

1

necessary in order to understand non-western social structures. More specifically, she claims that in the Yoruba context, a different structuring principle is in operation and needs to be theorised. Instead of the visual logic informing social division and hierarchy, through structures such as ge race and class, Oyewumi argues that it is in fact seniority that orders and divides Yoruba society. Seniority refers primarily to . However, it also refers to an agent’ s positioning within the kinship structure. An insider (i.e. extended blood relations) is always senior to an outsider who is marrying into the family. For the : the first-born is senior to all the other children. For an outsider marrying into the lineage however, their seniority rank depends on how many children (including blood relations) is already part of the lineage. and context dependent: 'no one is permanently in a senior or junior position; it all depends on who is present in any given situation (Oyewumi 1997: 42). For example, even if x is the first-born (and therefore senior in relation to the other members of the lineage), if x marries out, then she automatically is 'junior' with respect to her spouse's lineage. As an ordering power in the Yoruba context, seniority operates in terms of a patrilineal system (a fact which, remains problematically undertheorised in Oyewumi's account). For Oyewumi, (J.A. Fadipe cited in Oyewumi: 41) and is . Oyewumi’ s claim for the absence of gender in Yoruba culture and the centrality of seniority as an organising principle is based on two factors: a) there is (whereas seniority is linguistically marked and is therefore an essential component of Yoruba identity); and b) Yoruba social institutions and practices . Oyewumi elaborates the first claim by arguing that . Language 'represents major sources of information in constituting world-sense, mapping historical changes, and interpreting the social structure' (1997:32). As such, African languages have not been taken as seriously as they ought to be by students of Africa. Instead, knowledge about Yoruba cultures and indeed many African societies is . She argues that this dependency leads 'to serious distortions and quite often to a total misapprehension of Yoruba realities' (ibid:28). Unlike many European languages, where the category “woman” or “female” is often excluded or marked as Other to “man” or “male” who functions as the norm (in terms of generic usage of pronouns and at a general level of languag mical sex difference. The absence of a cultural or symbolic layer of meaning to gender distinction in Yoruba means that there is no noun equivalent to “woman” or “man” – these terms simply cannot be translated. Instead, the only distinction possible is between female and male – what Oyewumi refers to as “ana-male” and “ana-female”. For Oyewumi, the word obinrin, erroneously translated as "female/woman", […] does not derive etymologically from okunrin, as "wo-man" does from "man". Rin, the common suffix of okunrin and obinrin, suggests a common humanity; the prefixes obin and okun specify which variety of anatomy. There is no conception here of an original human type against which the other variety had to be measured. Eniyan is the non-gender-specific word for humans (ibid: 33). Against a western mindse ermine position or status in the Yoruba language. To turn Freud on his head, ‘ anatomy is not destiny’ . Obinrin (female) is not subordinate or powerless to okunrin (male). Neither is she symbolically or normatively inferior to him. Similarly, okunrin is not privileged over obinrin on account of his biology. In simple terms, sex difference has no normative implications beyond anatomical distinction. Instead, social positioning and identity is derived through a complex and dynamic web of social relations. Names, occupation, profession, status and so on are not marked linguistically in terms of gender. Therefore, categories that have the mark of gender in English have no equivalence in Yoruba. 'There are c; neither are oko and aya - two categories translated as the English husband and wife, respectively (Oyewumi 1997:28). Instead, it is seniority that is linguistically encoded in Yoruba: ‘ The third-person pronouns o and won make a distinction between older and younger in social relation’ (ibid: 40). An example we can suggest to illustrate the social pressure of this distinction occurs when two Yoruba meeting for the first time are quick to establish who is senior, junior or age-mate. In the absence of seniority status being agreed, the formal third-person pronoun won is used. Again, the desire to establish seniority and status achieves exaggerated effect in the fetishisation of names and professional titles. These are often linked together for additional prestige, so that people describe themselves (or are described as): Doctor, Chief, Mrs X or Professor (Mrs) Y. As one commentator on this phenomenon notes, The love for titles has reduced some Nigerians to sometimes prefixing their professional designations to their names. Hence such titles which people outside this country would view as absurd: Engineer X, Accountant Y, Architect Z and Surveyor X. Some individuals who served the country in missions abroad, […] have chosen to be addressed as Ambassador X

2

or Y. Would it be a surprise if in future we encounter such appellations as Mathematician X, Scientist Y and Linguist Z? (Ezeigbo 1996: 38). Thus, in social interactions, there is an , via what Ezeigbo calls “titlemania”. As this mode of Yoruba sociolinguistics contrasts so strongly with western forms, Oyewumi argues that it is essential that indigenous categories and grammar are examined and not assimilated into English, as is currently the case. For Oyewumi, the absence of gender in Yoruba language means that the “woman” theorised in many western feminist discourses in terms of negation and limitation has no equivalent in Yoruba culture. In contrast to the west, Yoruba women are not perceived as “powerless, disadvantaged, and controlled and defined by men’ (1997: xii). This line of argument leads to the second point about the constitution of identity in the social sphere: the absence of gender demarcation in language is reflected in a corresponding omission in . Yoruba institutions are traditionally organised around agbo ile – a compound housing facility composed of a group of people with common ancestry, sometimes specialising in a particular occupation such as weaving, dyeing, hunting, drumming and so on. The lineage group situated in the compound is the site for the expression of social legitimacy, authority and power. Each member of a lineage (whether ana-male or ana-female) is referred to both as omo-ile (children of the house/insider) and oko (husband). As we have seen, the Omo-ile/oko occupies a privileged position vis-à-vis an aya-ile (ana-female/wife/outsider). , by which all omo-ile are automatically senior to incoming outsiders irrespective of their chronological age. A woman therefore, is not intrinsically disadvantaged in relation to a man. As Oyewumi writes, Although ana-females who joined the lineage as aya were at a disadvantage, other anafemales who were members of the lineage by birth suffered no such disadvantage. It would be incorrect to say, then, that anatomic females within the lineage were subordinate because they were anatomic females. , and they were subordinate to oko as insiders. Oko comprised all omo-ile, both ana-males and anafemales, including children who were born before the entrance of a particular aya into the lineage. In a sense, aya lost their chronological age and entered the lineage as “new-borns”, but their ranking improved with time vis-à-vis other members of the lineage who were born after the aya entered the lineage (1997: 46). Oyewumi goes on to show that social practices (such as the division of labour, kinship, profession and monarchical structures) are not ordered in terms of . For example, she critiques the dominant assumption in West African studies that equates man with farming and woman with trading. She argues that among Oyo-Yorubas both okunrin and obinrin are represented in trade and farming. These distinctions ‘ are without foundation and so are nothing but an imposition of an alien model that distorts reality and leads to false simplification of social roles and relationships.’ (ibid: 76). Instead, occupation and status depend on how agents are positioned within the social field – a positioning that is always relative and contextual. Hence an ana-female could be both an aya and oko (an outsider to one lineage, an insider within another). At the level of practice, Oyewumi shows that there is . Ana-females are not precluded from becoming warriors, diviners, hunters, farmers and so on. Nor are ana-male excluded from trading and food preparation, even if this food preparation is only for themselves and not for the family. In this respect, using a term taken from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, we can say that Oyewumi points to the Yoruba as having their own " ”. It is the logic that Oyewumi wants most of all to excavate in order to produce indigenous knowledge. There is much to be admired in Oyewumi’ s challenge to current assumptions. She is surely correct to question the universalisation of gender categories as a fundamental organising principle in all societies and across time. To commit oneself to the assumption of gender is to remain unquestioningly embedded within a specific western intellectual tradition of critique. Of course, this does not mean that this tradition is itself fixed and unchanging. The point is rather that . It is true that as a first order principle of inquiry, gender may well be insufficient to capture the complexities of Oyo-Yoruba social reality. Of course, the more general point is that the threat of mistranslation works both ways. Just as the western gendered terms of woman and man do not translate directly into Yoruba, neither does the system of seniority necessarily translate into other cultural contexts. In this case, the crucial issue is remaining faithful to the specificities of local cultural experience and social structure. I also agree with Oyewumi when she argues that . If a gendered question is posed in a society where seniority is more dominant, a gendered response will nonetheless result. Contemporary scientific paradigms such as quantum mechanics have shown that the frame of the experiment in part produces its own results (measuring for mass renders velocity indeterminate and vice versa). In quantum mechanics, as elsewhere more generally in scientific and social scientific method, . Again, a basic principle within the phenomenological tradition is that there is

3

: the seer is always seen, the toucher always touched. always caught up in the dynamics of power relations and the field of culture itself.

” - they are

Despite the persuasive force of her text, there are two highly problematic aspects of Oyewumi’ s argument. First, we need to question her underlying methodology and theoretical assumptions of language and discourse. Second, her call for indigenous knowledge creates a problematic essentialism and authenticism. A Problematic Methodology In terms of Oyewumi’ s problematic methodology, I want to focus on three areas: a) the importance she ascribes to ; b) her understanding of ; and c) her assumption about the r . A philosophical discussion of these issues will clarify the import of her arguments against the universalisability of gender distinctions. a) Language as Cultural Truth In order to deny gender demarcation, it is important for Oyewumi’ s critique that she refers to a pre-colonial trajectory of anatomical difference, found in its purest form amongst the Oyo-Yoruba. In this way, okunrin and obinrin are tainted with symbolic, gender-based layers of meaning only through the colonial project. She therefore assumes that the original meanings of these words lies beneath the surface of colonial mis-projection and mishe nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were keen to articulate a sense of the power of classical Greece in terms of its parallels with the development of the European modern nation state. Etymology, and the desire to capture the “original” meaning of German and Greek words, was exactly the method the German philosopher Martin Heidegger employed in order to theorise the historical destiny of the German volk in the run up to the Nazi regime in the 1930s. In both cases, that of Oyewumi and certain strands of European thought, we can detect a questionable understanding of how words convey their meaning across time. The problematic assumption is . On what basis can one guarantee that a word’ s meaning at a certain point in history conveyed a given meaning? Even if an earlier meaning is detected (an easier task in literate cultures with a history of dictionaries, but more difficult in historically oral cultures like the Yoruba), how can we be sure that this previous connotation is the original meaning? This problematisation is especially pertinent in the Yoruba context - given the plethora of contested origin stories that abound amongst the Yoruba. A more accurate account of how words convey meaning across time would be one that emphasizes flux rather than stasis and conservation. Nietzsche’ s assertion that truth is a “mobile army of metaphors” is more useful here, describing the transient natures of words and the ways in which bodies (armies) transmit and transform words through motile communication with others in each historical presence.3 It may well be that even the history ascribed to a word is in part a projection of the present. In this sense, Oyewumi’ s claim about language revealing social dynamics can be at most half right. It may be that okunrin and obinrin appear to reveal little beyond anatomical difference; however, there is nothing in Oyewumi’ s argument that can support her supposition that this has always been the case. The danger of resulting to etymological arguments is that they ultimately support an authenticist and organicist approach to language and culture. Just as Heidegger wanted to express the authentic destiny of the German people, so too Oyewumi is specifically interested in the traditions and world-sense of the Oyo-Yoruba. But how can she be sure that the Oyo-Yorubas are the true originators of Yoruba beliefs and social practice? Why and what basis ascribe a linear history to words and their relation to origin myths? Why assume that the explicit meaning of a word forecloses and precludes other possible meanings of words? Alison Weir demonstrates precisely this point, in relation to an alternative non-essentialist conception of how meaning operates across time. She writes, referring to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: For Wittgenstein, : thus, the meanings of words can be better understood in terms of a multiplicity of interrelated usages. Once this model of language is combined with an historical model, it becomes possible to understand meanings as mediated through complex interrelations of different social practices in different contexts, through different discourse and institutions, which invest these concepts with multiple layers of meanings. 3

"What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten t...